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Welcome to Part 3 of this 3 part tutorial.

You may be asking yourself “But I thought that all surfaces were made up of triangular faces? I can’t see any individual triangular faces here!” YES: The surfaces ARE made up from triangular faces with coincident points. It’s just that at the moment Revit is not set to show us the edges of the triangular faces. But we can easily fix that.

Right-clock in the Site View and activate View Properties. From here, activate the Visibility / Graphic Overrides panel for this view.

Scroll down to Topography and expand it so that you can see all of the sub-categories within Topography:-

You will see that all sub-categories are checked apart from Triangulation Edges. Don’t worry about what all the other sub-categories refer to- we will look at some of the other aspects (such as Contours) in other separate tutorials.

Go ahead and check “Triangulation Edges” and click OK.

No we get to see exactly how our surface is made of 3 separate triangles. As we’ve seen, all you need to do is choose the height for the points and choose where the points are to be placed. Revit will handle the triangulation and creation of the faces.

In reality, very rarely is the topography of your site flat. So let’s make our toposurface a bit more realistic by adding in some undulations. Select the surface we have created and hit Edit to re-enter sketch mode:-

So far all of our points have been at an elevation of 0.0, which means that the entire surface is flat. Let’s add a small hill in the centre of our surface. We are now going to create a plateau 600mm high in the centre of our surface.

So go ahead and change the Elevation the points that we are about to place to 600.

Now draw five points in the centre of the surface, in a rough pentagon shape. You should end up with:-

Because we are looking at our surface in a plan view, it is impossible to see the undulating nature of it. Don’t worry- we’ll have a look at it in 3D in a minute. But for now, let’s add a little more to the top of our hill. Remaining in sketch mode, change the Elevation height to 1200:-

Now add four points (in a rough square shape) to the centre of our “hill”.

Your sketch should look like this:-

Now all we have to do is click on “Finish Surface” on the Site Design Bar and our surface is complete. Switch to the 3D View, ensure your view setting is “Shading with Edges” and shadows are turned on. Your surface should be similar to this one:-

Go ahead and rotate the view. Look at the surface from all angles, including underneath. You will see that we have created a fully three-dimensional topographical surface.

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